While most people appreciate the importance of physical fitness, many have difficulty finding the motivation required to maintain a regular exercise program. Some people find it particularly difficult to maintain an exercise regimen that involves continuously repetitive motions, such as running, walking and bicycling.
Experienced athletes and trainers have found that immediate and direct feedback provides many people with motivation to maximize the effort of their athletic activity. If a person is exercising with weights in gym, for example, a personal trainer will frequently provide that person words of encouragement, advice on lifting form, or other contemporaneous feedback. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to obtain direct feedback for some types of athletic activity, such as when a person is walking alone, running alone, riding a bicycle alone, or other solitary athletic activity away from sophisticated exercise equipment. Some manufacturers provide monitoring devices, such as heart rate monitors, pedometers, odometers and the like that a user can view while performing an athletic activity. While these monitoring devices do provide immediate feedback, they require the attention of the user, and thus may not provide feedback information when it might be of the most benefit to the user (e.g., as soon as the user begins to drop below or exceed a desired running pace).
In lieu of activity-specific or performance-specific feedback, many athletes listen to music or other audible content while performing an athletic activity. Some athletes, for example, believe that music or other audible content distracts their minds from monotonous athletic activities, such as walking, running, or bicycling. Accordingly, many athletes now use digital music players (i.e., players that play back music from a digital file stored on an electronic storage medium) to play back music during athletic activity sessions. With this type of music player, however, music or other audible content must be downloaded or otherwise transferred from an audible content file storage to the digital music player. In many cases, however, a user cannot accurately estimate how much audible content to transfer to the digital music player. The user may inadvertently transfer too little audible content to last for the entire duration of his or her planned athletic activity.